The Real Tragedy of Donnygate

Trump and Melania dance during the Freedom Ball on the day of his inauguration

By Kevin Dietsch/Pool/Getty Images.

There’s an old saw in the computer-security industry that there are two kinds of companies—those that have been hacked, and those that don’t know yet that they have been hacked. That not-so-reassuring adage has become an accepted truism in our modern, highly connected world. But in light of the guy currently inhabiting the White House, and the road that he and his disastrous administration took to get there, it appears that we’re likely going to have to change that dictum to a new and scarier one moving forward. Indeed, there are two kinds of countries—those that have been hacked, and those that don’t know yet that they have been hacked.

Whether or not Donald Trump Jr.’s exchange with Rob Goldstone constitutes collusion, and no matter the convoluted legal questions surrounding his now infamous meeting with a Russian attorney, along with Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, this latest fiasco merely underscores what most of the sentient world has known for ages: that Russian hackers, supported by the government, intended to affect our electoral process. This malfeasance may seem like a historical anomaly, not to mention a catastrophe, but its also probably just the beginning of what’s going to come in future elections.

Over the past decade, I’ve met (and written about) countless people and organizations involved in major hacking events, from penetration of government networks to breaching (pathetic) corporate firewalls, or just instances of teens and 20-somethings causing havoc for the “Lulz,” also known as fun. And after talking to the good guys, the bad guys, and those in the middle, there’s one thing that they can all agree on: it’s impossible to build a totally secure network. A former F.B.I. agent, who has worked on a number of high-profile hacking cases, once told me the only secure computer system is one that is not connected to a network, does not have any USB slots, and has top-level encryption passwords to get inside. Even then, it’s still not completely safe. “Nothing ever is,” the agent explained to me. I recently reached out to another security expert and asked if that remained the case. In short, this person told me, it’s simply “not possible to build a truly impenetrable system.” And this, you must remember, was coming from a person who made a living trying to build truly impenetrable computer systems.

WATCH: Why You Need to Ignore Trump Sometimes

So how does that bode for the future of democracy, here and abroad? In a normal non-Trump-led world, the United States would respond to allegations of a compromised election by marshaling its collective resources to investigate the matter and ensure it was never ever repeated. Instead, curiously, our current president has seemingly done everything humanly possible to quash any investigation into what really went down, including firing James Comey, getting involved in the D.O.J. investigation process, tweeting like a deranged madman, and meeting with Vladimir Putin to discuss the preposterous notion of putting together a joint cyber security task force with a sworn adversary. I don’t usually like to spend my time agreeing with Marco Rubio, but he did have a point when he tweeted: “Partnering with Putin on a ‘Cyber Security Unit’ is akin to partnering with Assad on a ‘Chemical Weapons Unit.’”

It’s easy to understand why Trump might not want to scrutinize the security breaches surrounding our election. An investigation could show that he did not win the electoral college fair and square. And such revelations could hinder his political future, should he or his entourage of Russia-friendly allies decide to run in 2020. The Democrats can’t do much to force this issue, either, given they’re a minority, beyond kick up the dirt and raise a fuss. But the larger question, at least for me, is why Silicon Valley, the industry that created this technology and could do the most to effectively marginalize it, has remained so visibly quiet.

The security researcher I spoke with aptly pointed out that countries have been “hacking” each other for years, if not decades. Yes, the U.S. has done it, and yes it’s been done to the U.S., too. This particular Russian attempt is clearly not the first time someone has breached the walls of our election process. But—and this is the most important part of this—in the past, without Facebook and Gmail and Twitter and a million other forms of communications, those hacks represented mostly just interference, rather than actual infiltrating espionage. Now, as the Internet controls everything, and everything we do is controlled by the Internet, these kinds of events can become catastrophic. And, as the researcher noted, things are only getting worse.

Take a look at what’s been happening in Ukraine over the past year. Last month alone, cyberattacks essentially knocked the country offline. A.T.M. machines stopped working, the software used to monitor the Chernobyl power plant failed, and the software used to bring Ukraine to its heels started to spread to other countries and corporations, including Australia, and the shipping company Maersk, and the drug company, Merck, in the United States. As Wiredrecently reported, Ukraine’s power grids were shut off earlier this year, allegedly hacked by the Russians, in what could be a prelude to what will happen in the U.S. during the next election cycle, or maybe even before.

When it comes to our government protecting us from such events, we can only hope and pray that there are enough intelligent people with actual power that didn’t quit or get fired by Trump, and are working to protect our power grids and other government-run infrastructure. But it seems that when it comes to our election process, that is not in the cards. So for now, it falls on Silicon Valley to help protect us. If the entire D.N.C. computer system can be infiltrated thanks to a phishing scam in John Podesta’s Gmail inbox, it seems Google should be building in better protections to ensure nothing like that ever happens again. If (real) fake news can be spread across Facebook and change how people vote, then Mark Zuckerberg might be better off focusing on how to avoid that from happening again, in addition to trotting around America on his listening tour. And if Russia can create and mobilize literally millions of bots to take to Twitter in support of Trump, spreading lies and attacking Americans, then the social network needs to find a way to stop this from ever happening again.

From all the people I’ve spoken with in Silicon Valley since November 8 about these issues, it seems that they all feel that, sure, the company they work for did play a role in Trump worming his way into the White House, and that the Russians did some nefarious computer work to help him get there. But, they also feel that their particular part in the play was minuscule, and that it was bigger, more emboldened forces that really led to these problems. Folks who work at Google, for example, don’t think it’s their fault that the D.N.C. was hacked; Facebook employees I’ve spoken to might agree that the network was infiltrated by fake news, but that it’s a straw man to say that the election process was because of the social network. In some respects they are right, but when you take a 10,000 foot view of what happened to our security systems, they are all equally culpable.

And if that’s the case, maybe it’s time for Silicon Valley to get more serious about how the technologies they have built are being used against us. They are, after all, one of the main reasons Donald Trump is the 45th President of the United States. Just ask Donny Jr., he’ll be able to tell you all about it.

Sundar Pichai

Sundar Pichai, Google’s C.E.O., was born in Chennai, India, immigrating to the U.S. to attend Stanford in 1993.

Photo: By Simon Dawson/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Sergey Brin

Alphabet president and Google co-founder Sergey Brin was born in Moscow and lived in the Soviet Union until he was six, immigrating with his family to the United States in 1979.

Photo: By FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, was born and raised in South Africa. He obtained Canadian citizenship in 1989 and briefly attended college at Queen's University in Ontario. He transferred to University of Pennsylvania, in part because such a move would allow him to get an H-1B visa and stay in the U.S. after college.

Photo: By Justin Chin/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Safra Catz

Safra Catz, who served as co-C.E.O. of Oracle, was born in Israel. She resigned from her executive role in December after joining Donald Trump’s presidential transition team.

Photo: By David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Peter Thiel

Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who has expressed support for the president’s executive action restricting immigration from several predominantly Muslim countries, is an immigrant himself. Before he co-founded PayPal and made one of the earliest large investments in Facebook, Thiel moved with his family from Germany, where he was born. In 2011, he also became a citizen of New Zealand, adding a third passport to his growing collection.

Photo: By Roger Askew/Rex/Shutterstock.

Satya Nadella

Born in Hyderabad, India, Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella came to the U.S. to study computer science, joining Microsoft in 1992.

Photo: By Stephen Brashear/Getty Images.

Garrett Camp

Garrett Camp helped co-found Uber. He was born in Alberta, Canada, and now resides in the Bay Area.

Photo: By Justin Lane/EPA/Rex/Shutterstock.

Sundar Pichai

Sundar Pichai, Google’s C.E.O., was born in Chennai, India, immigrating to the U.S. to attend Stanford in 1993.

By Simon Dawson/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Sergey Brin

Alphabet president and Google co-founder Sergey Brin was born in Moscow and lived in the Soviet Union until he was six, immigrating with his family to the United States in 1979.

By FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, was born and raised in South Africa. He obtained Canadian citizenship in 1989 and briefly attended college at Queen's University in Ontario. He transferred to University of Pennsylvania, in part because such a move would allow him to get an H-1B visa and stay in the U.S. after college.

By Justin Chin/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Safra Catz

Safra Catz, who served as co-C.E.O. of Oracle, was born in Israel. She resigned from her executive role in December after joining Donald Trump’s presidential transition team.

By David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Pierre Omidyar

The founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, was born in France to Iranian parents. He immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s.

By Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Jerry Yang

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang moved from Taiwan to San Jose, California, in 1978, at the age of 10.

by Scott Olson/Getty Images.

John and Patrick Collison

Brothers John Collison and Patrick Collison, twenty-something college dropouts who emigrated from Ireland, co-founded Stripe, a $9.2 billion payments start-up.

By Jerome Favre/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Adam Neumann

Adam Neumann, raised on an Israeli kibbutz, moved to the U.S. in 2001, after briefly serving in the Israeli army as a navy doctor. Now he’s the chief executive of the $16.9 billion New York-based WeWork, which sublets space to individuals and companies.

by Noam Galai/Getty Images.

Mario Schlosser

The co-founder and C.E.O. of health insurance start-up Oscar, Mario Schlosser, came to the United States from Germany as an international student, receiving his M.B.A. from Harvard.

By Kholood Eid/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Peter Thiel

Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who has expressed support for the president’s executive action restricting immigration from several predominantly Muslim countries, is an immigrant himself. Before he co-founded PayPal and made one of the earliest large investments in Facebook, Thiel moved with his family from Germany, where he was born. In 2011, he also became a citizen of New Zealand, adding a third passport to his growing collection.

By Roger Askew/Rex/Shutterstock.

Satya Nadella

Born in Hyderabad, India, Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella came to the U.S. to study computer science, joining Microsoft in 1992.

By Stephen Brashear/Getty Images.

Garrett Camp

Garrett Camp helped co-found Uber. He was born in Alberta, Canada, and now resides in the Bay Area.